Immanuel Christian, Covington, Smollett: 2019 Is Turning Out To Be The Year Of Hate Crime Hoaxes
Amari Allen’s story was a hoax. Over the past week or two, almost every reading American became familiar with Allen, the dread-locked schoolgirl who claimed that “three white boys” snatched her from a slide on the campus of the prestigious Immanuel Christian School in Smithfield, held her down, and cut off some of her hair while mockingly calling it “nappy.”
Because of the alleged incident’s shocking nature, and te fact that Second Lady Karen Pence was an art teacher there, Immanuel Christian became (yet another) ground zero for a national discussion about race and “privilege.” And then, that discussion collapsed: Allen confessed to literally making the whole thing up.
Allen’s hoax was not some unique, one-off incident. During this past year alone, a number of internationally prominent hate crime and hate incident hoaxes have occurred in the USA. In July, popular Georgia State Senator Erica Thomas claimed that she had been shamefully attacked, in a Publix grocery store, by a white male who screamed at her and told her to “go back home.” In fact, the “white man” turned out to Cuban-American Democratic Party activist Eric Sparkes, who literally showed up at Thomas’ melodramatic press conference to rebut her story. (RELATED: Sixth-Grade Girl Admits To Fabricating Hate Attack That Media Linked To Mike Pence’s Wife, School Says)
More recently, on September 12, 2019, someone wrote racial insults, swastikas, and the word “MAGA” throughout two restaurants owned by former NFL player Edawn Coughman. The perp turned out to be Coughman himself, who was spotted leaving the scene by witnesses. Most famously, on January 29, 2019, actor Jussie Smollett – famously mocked as the mad Frenchman ‘Juicy Smolliet’ by comedy legend Dave Chappelle – claimed that he had been attacked at 2am, in the middle of a Chicago blizzard, by two burly white men wearing Trump campaign MAGA hats. Smollett’s bizarre story was exposed as an almost certain lie when two Nigerian brothers, buddies of his from the local gym, confessed to having been paid by Smollett to stage his beating.
This year was not unusual. It was, in fact, a bit less active than average on the hate hoax front. Putting together my 2019 book Hate Crime Hoax, I was able to fairly easily compile 409 confirmed hate hoaxes, concentrated in the five years before publication. I defined a “hate hoax” as (1) an undisputed report (police report and/or reputable national or regional media story), of (2) a serious incident (generally felony or misdemeanor offense), that was (3) attributed to dislike of or bias against an out-group, where (4) the narrative of “hate” completely collapsed (with this collapse also being reported). My master list is now up to 611 case studies of hate hoaxes, containing more than 800 unique incidents. To put these numbers in context, less than 7,000 hate crimes are reported to the FBI by police departments in a typical year, and only 8-10% receive the media coverage that would make them potential candidates for my data sets. (RELATED: Several Media Outlets Made Blunders In Reporting On The Haircut Hate Hoax In Virginia — The List)
Interestingly, hoaxes seem to be most common among the most high-profile, widely reported stories of “hate.” Of the 20-odd hate incident cases, mass shootings aside, that became truly international stories over the past decade and change, literally about half of them – Smollett, Allen, Covington Catholic, Yasmin Seweid and the ripped hijab, Air Force Academy, the “burnt Black church” (Hopewell Baptist), the little Black girl in Grand Rapids who said boorish white men literally peed on her, the Rolling Stone cover story about anti-woman rape gangs at U-Virginia, the Nikki Jolly house fire and the dead purebred dogs, the “nooses on campus” (Wisconsin-Parkside), Duke Lacrosse – turned out to be total fakes. Many hate hoaxers have a taste for the dramatic, which often betrays them in the end.